Lars Iyer's Blog, page 27

��� suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, all his life���s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.

Prince Myshkin, from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Very sorry to hear of Mark Wood's death.  Like many others, Wood s lot was my first port of call whenever I connected to the internet. 

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities ��� I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not ��� that one endures.

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.

Nietzsche

It is true that there was an evolution in my political practice: this evolution unfolded itself (in part) through historical events, the rise of Hitler, the war in Spain (the r��cit L''Idylle' marked the importance that this had for me), 1940, the resistance. But it unfolded itself more profoundly through the necessities of literary experience. The long ordeal that was Thomas l'Obscur changed me metaphysically and politically, in a radical manner, and to the degree that Faux Pas is a theoretical response to Thomas l'Obscur I can absolutely reject the influence of Maurras and you can see that he is, literally and philosophically, at the antipodes of my inclinations.

Blanchot, undated letter to ��velyne Londyn, cited here

Green believed that well-groomed, well-behaved English was an obstacle to expression. But his style wasn���t a merely negative exercise, a winnowing or clearing out: he delivered a gorgeous, full-bodied alternative. (via)

May '68 and the Prague Spring were political failures which profited us much more than any victory, by virtue of the ideological vacuum they created. Not knowing where we were going, as happened to us in the street those days, but knowing only that we were going, that we were on the move, so to speak, without fear of the consequences and the contradictions - that's what we learnt. [...]

Do you believe in God?

To know that, if there's a divinity, it can only be within us, seeing that there's only emptiness around us, is no help in solving the problem. not believing in God is just one more credo. I doubt whether it' possible not to believe at all. That would be like removing all meaning, all eternity from the great passions of our lives. everything would become an end in itself, with no consequences. Though we can't  rule out the future of humanity being just that, either. [...]

The title [of The Lover] isn't original.

I decided on it after I'd finished the book, as a reaction against all the books with that same title. it isn't a story about love, but about everything in passion that remains suspended and incapable of being named. The entire meaning of the book lies there, in that ellipsis. [...]

Memory, digressions and flashbacks have always been an integral part of the narrative structure of your works.

It's often thought that life is punctuated chronologically by events. In reality, we don't know their significance. It's memory that restores their lost meaning to us. and yet all that remains visible and expressible is often the superfluous, the mere appearances, the surface of our experience. The rest stays inside, obscure, so intense that we can't even speak of it. The more intense things are, the more difficult it becomes for them to surface in their entirety. Working with memory in the classical sense doesn't interest me - it's not about stores of memory that we can dip into for facts, as we like. Moreover, the very act of forgetting is necessary - absolutely. If eighty per cent of what happened to us wasn't repressed, then living would be unbearable. True memory is forgetting, emptiness - the memory that enables us not to succumb to the oppression of recollection and of the blinding pain which, fortunately, we have forgotten.

Citing Flaubert, and with him a large part of the contemporary literary tradition, Jacqueline Risset has spoken of your work as an uninterrupted series of 'books about nothing'. Novels built precisely on nothingness.

To write isn't to tell a story, but to evoke what there is around it; you create around the story, one moment after another. Everything there is, but everything which might also not be or which might be interchangeable - like the events of life. The story and its unreality, or its absence. [...]

The events of our lives are never unique, nor do they succeed one another unambiguously, as we would wish. Multiple and irreducible, they echo infinitely in consciousness; they come and go from our past to the future, spreading like an echo, like circles rippling out in water, constantly exchanging places. [...]

Could you define the actual process of your writing?

It's an incorrigible inspiration that comes to me more or less once a week, then disappears for months. a very ancient injunction - the need to sit oneself down to rite without as yet knowing what. the writing itself attests to this ignorance, to this search for the shadowy place where the entirety of experience is gathered.

For a long time I thought writing was a job of work. I'm now convinced that it's an inner event, a 'non-work' that you accomplish, above all, by emptying yourself out, and allowing what's already self-evident to percolate through. I wouldn't speak so much about economy, form or composition of prose as about balances of opposing forces that have to be identified, classified, contained by language like a musical score. If you don't take that into account, then you do indeed write 'free' books, but writing has nothing to do with that kind of freedom.

So that would be the ultimate reason you write?

What's painful is having to perforate our inner darkness until its primal potency spreads over the whole page, converting what is by nature 'internal into something 'external'. That's why I say that only the mad write absolutely. their memory is a 'holed' memory, addressed totally to the outside world. [...]

I write to be coarsened, to be torn to pieces, and then to lose my importance, to unburden myself - for the text to take my place so that I exist less. There are only two ways I manage to free myself of me: by the idea of suicide and the idea of writing.

Marguerite Duras, interviewed 

Out now - the Spanish translation of Exodus.

Out soon - the Spanish translation of Exodus.

(Back in March, I discussed Josipovici's work with him at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts. No recording exists (but there are a few pictures), but I thought I'd put up my introduction to the event.)

Gabriel Josipovici is a major contemporary English novelist, playwright and critic, whose work spans several genres. There are now eighteen novels, four collections of short fiction, eight critical books, a memoir of his mother, the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch, and numerous plays for stage and radio. He is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and has two books forthcoming this year: a study of Hamlet from Yale, and a collection of essays from Carcanet.

Gabriel was born in 1940 in Nice, France, surviving the war in the French Alps, before returning to Cairo with his Egyptian-Jewish parents. He accompanied his mother to England in 1956, where he read English at Oxford before becoming a professor at Sussex University, where he retired in 1998. His work has been widely celebrated, but he has never been a literary insider, and, indeed, has often found himself at odds with English literary culture.

This may have something to do with the unique perspective he brings to both his fiction and his critical writings. Gabriel has said that he���s never felt ���inward��� with England and with English life. This is not something he laments ��� indeed, these circumstances, he says, are less a disadvantage than a privilege. Part of this privilege is that it���s meant that he has cultivated a sense of the fragmentariness and insecurity of human experience ��� a sense that our lives are more incomplete and disordered than they might seem, and that we are never quite at home in the world.

This is apparent in Gabriel���s account of the novel. Take the two great achievements of the novel genre: psychology, that is, the depiction of interior life, and social expansiveness, that is, the surveying of a complex social universe. Novels typically show depth in their rendering of human interiority, and breadth in their presentation of a social panoply. The danger comes when the achievement of this depth and breadth is dependent on the model of representation. For this kind of realism depends on a kind of bad faith. This is apparent, Gabriel suggests, in the use of an impersonal narrator, describing a scene from a position outside space and time. Such a position is unavailable to us, and is, as such, dishonest. The use of first-person narrative might seem a solution to this problem, but too often one finds exactly the same kind of remove, for example, in the use of description, which implicitly depends on the narrator stopping to describe an environment. Bad faith again, since we rarely pause in this way. The question, then, is how we write without the remove in question. How do we show fidelity to our experience of passing through the world in all its openness and its fleetingness?

Fiction, Gabriel suggests, too often relies on schematic ways of presenting character, plot and narrative tension, rather than trying to stay with a kind of uncertainty and unknowing that is implicit to our experience. His solution is to place emphasis on the direct presentation of dialogue in his fiction. Gabriel is, indeed, a peerless writer of dialogue, using it to drive his stories forward rather than psychological analysis. His novels are usually chamber-pieces, with a limited number of characters, and often focus on artists and musicians, who explore the same kind of questions Gabriel responds to in his fiction.

Gabriel is not, as is often portrayed, a difficult author. He is not committed to grim-faced experimentalism or to the most forbidding varieties of high modernism. His fiction is never solemn, but light; never monumental, but modest. It is sparse, dialogue-driven, and often witty. It is moving, yet utterly unsentimental. He can deal with the grimmest of topics without ponderousness. And it is, above all, playful, in a way that, as Gabriel argues in his critical work, several centuries of Western art has made us forget. He is insistent that his art should be seen not a window on the world ��� a representation of the way things are ��� but as a toy, as a hobby-horse on which we can jump and ride and then discard as a mere stick. It seeks our co-operation. It asks us to admit that we know less than we think we do, and that the world is more open than we think. It asks us to remain with doubt and uncertainty, and does not hide its artifice.

Why, then, has his work not been met in this spirit? Perhaps because the freedom it gives to its reader is too great ��� because it does not resemble the slick and technically accomplished literary fiction that guards itself from openness, from experience. In one sense, Gabriel���s fate is that of second-phase modernists such as Gert Hofmann and Thomas Bernhard ��� authors ignored by mainstream English criticism, which prefers its literary fiction ponderously focused on ���big��� themes or moments in history. But Gabriel���s situation is very different, since he is based in this country and, in his criticism and reviews, has addressed himself to our literary establishment.

Those of us have always felt that our literary culture is paranoically enclosed, shut tight against Europe, against Modernism in its various phases, against anything but the Usual Stuff, have been unsurprised at the hostile and philistine reception of Gabriel���s What Ever Happened to Modernism?, as well as by the widespread neglect of his recent novels. Thank goodness, then, for the alternative media, the world of blogging, which has seen a broadening of readers acquainted with Gabriel���s work. And thank goodness for our event tonight, which I hope will introduce or re-introduce you to one of our few examples of literary integrity.

 And I���m not writing for dorks who need descriptions of everything, right? ���There���s some grass growing there, over there is an orange tree that carries oranges, and the oranges are initially green, and then they turn yellow, and eventually they receive an orange colour���. Well, I always have the feeling, whenever I���m writing, that I am in a certain place, and everyone knows anyway where that is, and I spare myself the necessity of all that. That way, I give the people leeway ��� right? But the people who describe all that ��� right? ��� ���They enter through the door, then she meets Doctor Uebermichl, and he���s got a briefcase, and it���s a Pierre Cardin briefcase, and inside the briefcase there are seven files from the company Soandso. And then he���s even wearing a hat with a black band, and towards the rear it is tied together in a bow���. All that is uninteresting, but that is what most of the writing industry is made of. Because people cannot think in big acts and large steps, but can only take extremely tiny small-bourgeois, conclusive mini-steps. That���s horrible! Well, describing nature is nonsense anyway, because everyone knows it, right? That���s stupid, right? Everybody who���s been in the countryside or in a garden knows what���s going on there. Consequently you don���t need to describe that. The only interesting thing is what���s happening in the countryside or in the garden, right? ���Omit���, they say, right? But nowadays it���s modern again that you ��� you know, every little thing is being included, right? Sixty pages have already gone by before someone has even left through the front door or the garden gate. And that���s even uneconomic, right? And constantly people are going crazy because the poet has no imagination and no idea how the story should go on.

Thomas Bernhard, interviewed